Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  Local and international media outlets, including the BBC, were subject to twice-daily checks by the junta censor, who alone had the power to decide what would and would not be reported. What was considered offensive to ‘Islamic ideology’, a pet cause of the fundamentalist General, was often absurd and arbitrary – one over-eager TV producer went as far as censoring Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl out of the cartoon because she wore a skirt.4 Women anchors on Pakistan state television, PTV, were required to wear a hijab before being allowed on air. Mehtab Rashdi, a newscaster, was the first woman to quit in response to the mandatory hijab edict.

  The reporting of any item that made the military regime look bad was considered ‘anti-state’. Hussain Naqi, the Lahore bureau chief of the Pakistan Press Institute, lost his job in 1984 when he reported that the US President had stated during a press conference that Pakistan wasn’t a democracy.5 Such a close watch was kept on the press that news of hunger strikes, student protests and political rallies were made known to reporters and editors only to prevent them from covering such events.6

  While previous governments in Pakistan – in fact, one could be generous and say all governments – had imposed restrictions on the press at some point or other, no other government was as ruthless in meting out punishment for press disobedience as Zia’s. In 1978, the editors of the Urdu dailies the Urdu Digest, the Sun and the PPP’s Musawat were arrested and sentenced to one year of rigorous imprisonment and ten public lashes for ‘publishing derogatory remarks against Zia’.7 They were later pardoned and released but the message was clear. Disobedience to the state was unacceptable. Siddiqueh Hidayatullah, a teacher who was at the start of her career at Kinnaird College in Lahore, witnessed the frenzy around the city’s first public flogging and described the spectacle for me. ‘The lashing was being held on a large chowrangi or roundabout on Jail Road, right there in the open, in the middle of a busy street. People came in what looked like the thousands to watch, some were called from the nearby bazaars and others must have just turned up to have a look. Some men even climbed trees to have a decent view. It was sick. There was such a tamasha, or commotion, created around the floggings so that all of us would know how ferocious the regime was.’8 The same year, the editor of the Karachi daily Sadaqat – which would eventually be permanently shut down – was arrested for the crime of criticizing the government’s central budget.9

  Local playwrights, poets and writers were also subject to Zia’s lack of tolerance for creativity and were punished or silenced, and forced to leave the country when their writing made the junta unhappy. Notable writers from this time who fled Pakistan include the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who took refuge in Beirut, Rehmatullah Majothi, Naseer Mirza and Tariq Ali.

  While reporters and editors continued to resist government censorship and were punished for their defiance with prison sentences or fines, the turning point came in May 1978 when four newsmen were publicly flogged for their dissidence.10 Never before in the history of Pakistan had journalists been so brutalized. But the punishment failed to have the desired effect among the populace – instead of scaring the press into submission, the public floggings pushed members of the press towards actively resisting the government and they did this in two ways.

  First, journalists began to invite arrest by staging highly visible sitins, hunger strikes and rallies and by printing material critical of the government. In the two months after the floggings took place, 150 journalists were arrested.11 Zia justified his regime’s unforgiving treatment of the press by declaring, ‘I have no respect for these newspapers and journalists who blindly use the stick of the pen to harm national interests.’12

  His comments only further enraged the press corps. As well as courting arrest, newsmen began an indefinite hunger strike at the offices of Musawat in 1979 as a protest against the paper’s closure. They agitated until they were carried away and arrested by the police.13 Nine Urdu dailies in Muzzafarabad were shut down by a local magistrate’s decree in 1979 as they refused to cease printing material critical of the government.14 Ten journalists in Lahore lost their jobs in 1983 for taking part in a civil disobedience campaign protesting the extensive government repression, and as further punishment were banned from working in the media for the duration of Zia’s rule.

  Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’. Newspapers, under the orders of the board of censors, had to submit each and every article ahead of publication. Often, the board crossed out entire stories and news items it considered unfit to be edited, let alone published. Instead of filling their papers with large swathes of meaningless items, the newspapers began to leave the spaces blank. When the largest English daily newspaper, Dawn – an establishment mouthpiece – printed almost an entire newspaper of empty columns, the government threatened it with permanent closure15.

  Many other newspapers followed suit, changing their tactics only once the government censors caught on. When blank columns in newspapers were forbidden, journalists like Mazhar Abbas, who wrote for the Daily Star, began resisting the censor’s pen more caustically. ‘In the blank spaces we would print a picture of a donkey or a dog and print news of Zia speaking or his ministers speaking underneath the pictures. So, they realized then that something fishy was going on, Then they said you had to inform the censorship board specifically of what news you would use to fill the blank spaces!’16

  When the censors tightened their reins further, cutting items in the evening that they had approved in the day’s check, the papers began circumventing them altogether. News items that the Karachi censors had cut would be printed in the newspaper’s Lahore edition, which had entirely separate printers and censors17. The efforts of the press, acting more or less as a unified front against Zia, successfully resisted the attempts to make the fourth estate into an agent of martial law.

  During Zia’s time, half my family was in exile and the other half in jail. When I began my research into the period, I turned to journalists – who, as luck would have it, had taken Zia’s repression personally enough to share their detailed memories with me when my textbooks and newspaper clippings became too dry.

  I was twenty-two and in England studying for my master’s, and flirting with the idea of a journey through my father and family’s past, I decided to write my own master’s thesis on resistance to General Zia’s dictatorship. It was a timely topic; Zia’s successor, General Musharraf, was in the sixth year of his rule and a new Afghan war was on Pakistan’s horizon. But it was more than just intellectual curiosity that shaped my dissertation. I wanted to understand my father. I wanted to break the taboo of talking about what happened in Afghanistan. I grew up idolizing my father’s decision to take up arms against Pakistan’s military junta, but as I got older and had to grow up without my father I began to stuggle past my childhood reverence. Why had he gone to Kabul? It was a decision that altered all our lives. It wasn’t enough just to know he had gone. It wasn’t enough just to love him, regardless of his choices. I had to dig deeper and understand what happened through retrospective lenses. My reverence for my father did not change, but my method of questioning did. I buried myself in libraries, consuming resistance theory and history during what should have been an unencumbered and self-congratulatory time of study. My choice not only gave me the tools to understand a period that had been mythical for me growing up, but also gave me the added benefit of distance when working to understand a history that had deeply personal consequences.

  Along with journalists and other members of the press, lawyers were also vocal critics of Zia’s regime. Since the earliest days of the junta, Pakistani lawyers ‘intermittently held conventions, organized protest marches, boycotted the courts and offered themselves for arrest’18 to press for the demand that martial law be withdrawn, the judiciary freed, and civil and political rights restored. The lawyers’ movement that rose against Pervez Musharraf’s regime in 2007 was
by no means the first of its kind; it had its roots in the lawyers’ movement against Zia ul Haq.

  In the first few months of 1981 alone, 460 lawyers were arrested for demonstrating against martial law.19 The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its interference in the state’s legal affairs. The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.20

  Once the way had been cleared by the doctrine for Zia’s regime to remain in power, the General began to cultivate a judiciary favourable to the junta. By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.21 The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.

  The federal Sharia benches were comprised of clerics, often lacking any background in civil legal affairs. It was their job to examine whether laws were ‘repugnant to the provisions of Islam’ and on that basis declare the offensive laws immediately null and void.22 Meanwhile, the military tribunals were given a greatly expanded jurisdiction and were able to operate without civilian review. According to Ordinance 77, the tribunals were afforded the authority to hear all cases involving ‘political offences, violations against martial law regulations and all other offences under the Pakistan penal code’.23

  The military tribunals wasted no time in discarding basic civil and legal liberties; under the new draconian court system prisoners did not have the right to be charged, could be held for indefinite periods without charge, the court was under no compunction to keep records of the charges or the ensuing legal proceedings, the number of cases tried under such courts were not made public, and legal counsel for the accused could only observe, not participate in, the proceedings against their clients.24

  Several cases came to light in 1984 that encapsulated the illegality of the regime and spurred the legal community to further resistence. Two cases, both involving gross legal violations, especially galvanized it. The first was the Rawalpindi Jail Case in which eighteen defendants were arrested for ‘anti-state’ activities, though it would be a year before specific charges were lodged against them. Eventually their trial was held in camera in prison and they were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government with the aid of an unnamed foreign power. The defendants were denied a fair trial and refused access to their families, the press and often to their legal counsel.25

  The second case, the Kot Lakhpat Jail Case, was an escalation of the previous one: fifty-four defendants were held on similar charges. However, in this case their lawyers were required to take a ‘secrecy oath’ by which they swore not to reveal any details of the trial, which was also held in camera in prison. Fifty of the defendants in the Kot Lakhpat Jail Case boycotted the trial and went on hunger strike to protest being held in subhuman conditions and denied the right of a fair trial.26

  While these two particular trials garnered tremendous media attention and legal outrage, bringing more lawyers to the streets in protest, it was only the beginning. The regime had begun putting people to death for ‘anti-state’ activities at an alarming rate. It’s estimated that between 1979 and 1985, the peak of the junta’s brutality, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 people were put to death by the state. While mercy pleas were allowed, by the mid-1980s General Zia had not once commuted a death sentence.27

  Zia had a penchant for the theatrical; along with sweeping midnight arrests and raids, it was possible to go to a neighbourhood stadium or cricket ground – it is worth noting that the national cricket team never protested and seemed more than happy to be used by the regime whenever necessary, such as in Zia’s foreign policy triumph of ‘cricket diplomacy’ with India, which was as one-dimensional as it sounds – and watch public floggings, public executions and, in time, public stonings of women. According to Foucault, public torture and executions do not re-establish justice, but rather ‘reactivate power’.28 They are highly political rituals wherein the injured ruler is restored to grandeur and sovereignty by manifesting his power at ‘its most spectacular’.29

  While women were active in the political resistance and were members of the press and legal community, the Hudood Ordinances of 1979 opened up a new front for opposition led largely by women. The Ordinances, which still remain in place today, are a compilation of laws dealing mainly with women’s bodies and the notion of zina, which in Arabic denotes sexual intercourse between an unmarried man and woman. Zina bil jabr is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock. Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in zina bil jabr. The Ordinances also dealt with adultery, basic sexual relations and prostitution.30

  The Hudood laws carried clauses prohibiting alcohol and narcotics, untoward activities carried out by minorities (whatever those may be), theft and other petty crimes. They were unusual not only in their puritanical reordering of private life but also in the punishments they prescribed for these ‘crimes’; most commonly public flogging and imprisonment, but also public stoning to death, amputations and fines.31

  Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.32 Moreover, zina laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’,33 which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.

  The Hudood Ordinances define Zia’s medieval and barbaric rule, but he did more than just brutalize the nation’s laws; he fundamentally changed its people and society. In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances. Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes.34 It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.

  Women all over Pakistan took to the streets calling for the removal of the Hudood Ordinances and were viciously beaten and arrested by the police for their protests.35 In addition, women lawyers organized under the Pakistan Women Lawyers Assocation (PWLA) and called conferences, under the threat of severe government harassment, in 1982, 1983 and finally 1985 to bring attention to the brutality of the Ordinances.36 Besides the PWLA, other women’s groups that exist in Pakistan today trace their origins back to the movement of resistance against Zia’s archaic laws. Several groups sprang up to organize women and campaign for increased rights, notably the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) and the Women’s Action Forum (WAF).37

  No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear. If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.38

  Marx’s ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ did not produce a compliant labour force, but exactly the opposite, at least until 1985, when politics destroyed the resistance movement agai
nst the junta. Merchants and small street vendors were politically powerful in terms of numbers and engaged in visible grass-roots resistance. Traditionally, the group had not ‘actively supported any government except Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s’39 and thus made up a lively section of the resistance movement against the military junta. The short-term economic restrictions of making a living did not hinder merchants, traders or labourers from hitting back against the junta. Zia squeezed the group by attacking their rights and working conditions. They resisted by staging strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and marches in the streets throughout Zia’s tenure.40

  Labour unions were broken by the regime and Zia actively oversaw the weakening of unionization and the labour rights movements. In 1981, the General banned all union activity in Pakistan International Airlines. PIA’s union offices were sealed and union office bearers and workers were arrested when they resisted the government’s decision.41 When workers of the newly commissioned Karachi Steel Mills demonstrated for more labour freedom in late 1981, they were beaten by the police and the president of the workers’ union was carted off to jail.42 The Pakistan Labour Conference, set to be held in Lahore that same year, was closed down by the government as their forces worked overtime blocking the entry of labour leaders into the Punjab province.43

  The more union members resisted Zia’s anti-labour laws, the more ruthlessly they were punished. A trade union leader was notoriously held in both Camp and Kot Lakhpat jails and after being stripped on arrival in both prisons was stretched out on a tiktiki – an A-frame to which his hands, feet and midriff were tied – and whipped.44 Factory workers all over the country were routinely arrested, beaten and tortured by prison authorities for opposing the government’s anti-labour dictates and rallying for better working conditions.45

  Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta. The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.46 Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.47